


What Freud Said

by thepointoftheneedle



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Dream AU, F/M, Fluff, Future Fic, Happy Ending, Smut, a bad thing happens to Betty in a dream, coffee shop AU, mentions of background events of 2020, where 2020 is but a bad memory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:27:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28088484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepointoftheneedle/pseuds/thepointoftheneedle
Summary: Jughead is having trouble with a recurring dream.  This story begins in the summer of 2020 with relevant background events and moves to its happy and safe resolution on Christmas Day 2021.With a smile of relief, he saw the soft glimmer of dawning realisation. He was dreaming.  The toxic cocktail of boredom and anxiety had given rise to one of those vivid dreams so widely reported in this, the year of our demon 2020. So,  as Freud would say, waggling his head, his dream was the fulfilment of a wish. As confirmation there, in a shadowy corner, was a blonde girl who he’d transferred across from his, admittedly vanilla, fantasy life.  Since he was dreaming, he allowed himself to look at her in a way he would not have permitted himself while awake, to appreciate her a little.  Credit to his id, it was doing sterling work.
Relationships: Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones
Comments: 31
Kudos: 56
Collections: 8th Bughead Fanfiction Awards - Nominees





	What Freud Said

**Author's Note:**

> I mention Freud and Jung in this story so if you are unfamiliar with their ideas I have put a little note at the end. You don't need to know any of that but it might be of interest.
> 
> This whole story is inspired by Shakespeare’s Sonnet 43 (which is a banger)
> 
> When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,  
> For all the day they view things unrespected;  
> But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,  
> And darkly bright, are bright in dark directed.  
> Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright,  
> How would thy shadow's form form happy show  
> To the clear day with thy much clearer light,  
> When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so!  
> How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made  
> By looking on thee in the living day,  
> When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade  
> Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay!  
> All days are nights to see till I see thee,  
> And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.

He’d been thinking about Freud a lot lately. He didn’t like it. Back in college he’d had an unsatisfactory, blink and you’ll miss it relationship with a psych major. She’d had a Freud bobble head doll on her nightstand. Cute … not. He’d be frantically trying to find some magical angle or rhythm that’d sweep her into ecstasy so he could finally let go without being a selfish asshat while Siggy Freud wobbled his head and waved a cigar at him, whether in rebuke or encouragement, he couldn’t say. It was enough to generate quite the neurosis. Anyway, Freud said that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious and right now his unconscious was doing doughnuts and leaving rubber all over that road, in the form of a recurring dream. Not about the psych major, he’d successfully consigned her to his repression dungeon. It was about a coffee shop. And a reader. 

At first the dream had been mildly unsettling, then it had become a refuge from the scary realities of a dumpster fire of a year. By the end it was a horror show and, in that way of dreams, he was completely powerless to derail the nightmare as it careened toward its terrible destination. It wasn't that Ephialtes was a stranger to him. He often had vivid dreams. It was an occupational hazard for a person who earned his living by selling his imagination. There was the nightmare he had occasionally during his MFA, in which he was reading his pages for the disparagement of his fellow students (“I’m not saying it’s bad per se, just... problematic.”) and, hearing them sniggering, realised that he was completely buck naked. For some reason, in that dream, he continued to read, trying to style it out, even as the giggles and snorts became belly laughs and the professor joined in, pointing and guffawing. There was also the dream that he had as a teenager. The one where his dad found him bedded down in the projection booth at the Twilight and like the Big Bad Wolf pulled the shack down around him while he just lay there, impotently, in his cot, snow falling and the film reels opening, exposing the precious celluloid to the elements. He didn’t need a therapist to interpret either of those. Writing was an exercise in vulnerability, when he wrote, he exposed himself. His subconscious was not averse to a cringeworthy pun apparently. The other one would have given Freud a field day. Daddy issues were Siggy’s crack (well, daddy issues and prodigious quantities of cocaine if the biographies were to be believed). Jug came from a broken home and clearly he blamed FP for breaking it. The movie reels were obviously his dreams and hopes, dissolving in contact with harsh reality as a consequence of his father’s actions. This new dream wasn’t as amenable to amateur analysis. Not when he saw it through to its shocking end.

It had begun in the tedious terror of the plague year, people flinching away from each other in the fluorescent lighting of the twenty four hour grocery store, their eyes widening in panic above their masks if someone cleared their throat. As if the virus weren’t enough to cope with that summer, the streets had been blazing with a righteous fury born of hundreds of years of oppression and injustice, fuel being poured on that inferno by an administration that wanted the country to burn as long as they were selling the gasoline. For a few weeks he’d felt that real life was a nightmare, eventually switching off the news broadcasts and deactivating the few social media platforms his publisher insisted that he maintain. He simply had no spare capacity for yet more misery. He swore that if a plague of flying monkeys had appeared at any point he would have accepted that it was just more of the same shit. If he went to a protest on one of those vivid summer afternoons he felt guilty, that he was complicit in spreading the virus, if he stayed home to flatten the curve he felt like he was abusing his privilege, failing to be an ally. So his waking life was characterised by vacillation between rage and guilt and fear but then, in the middle of it, one restless night he’d found himself here, in this peaceful, unfamiliar coffee shop where no one wore a mask, where the only person looking nervous was a guy standing to greet a girl with a hug, maybe on a first date. It felt strange to observe folks meeting without asking each other the questions everyone began conversations with at the time, "Are you ok? Everyone at home keeping healthy?" 

He'd looked for the distance guides taped on the floor, for the yellow notices exhorting patrons to keep their distance, to stay safe, to wash their hands. Their absence summoned a knot of tension in his shoulders. He watched in alarm as a woman used her own fork to pass her elderly relative a morsel of cake and he almost dashed it from the old lady's tremulous hand. Fear had become endemic as rapidly as the virus in the city. Then, with a smile of relief, he saw the soft glimmer of dawning realisation. He was dreaming. The toxic cocktail of boredom and anxiety had given rise to one of those vivid dreams so widely reported in this, the year of our demon 2020. So, as Freud would say, waggling his head, his dream was the fulfilment of a wish. As confirmation there, in a shadowy corner, was a blonde girl who he’d transferred across from his, admittedly vanilla, fantasy life. Since he was dreaming, he allowed himself to look at her in a way he would not have permitted himself while awake, to appreciate her a little. Credit to his id, it was doing sterling work. She was beautiful in a natural, honest way. This was her real face not something she had shopped for. Her hair might have had a little help but it was still glossy and bouncy, falling to her shoulders in golden waves. And she was reading. Even in his dream he was fascinated by other people’s reading habits so he craned forward a little to see the cover, Sigmund Freud “The Interpretation of Dreams.” He chuckled, imagining his subconscious capping that punchline with a “Ba-dum-tish, thanks folks, I’m here all week.” His mind was protecting him by transporting him away from a reality where every day was floodlit with anxiety, to dream of an alternate dimension where a place like this, steamy, crowded, under ventilated, filled with laughter and the occasional sneeze, was the epitome of every day normality. In this reality the ordinary activities of daily life were uncontaminated with fear and powerlessness. He was being picked up by the tornado of the virus and political chaos and twirled around until his dream threw him down somewhere away from all that grim reality. And, despite his protestations and assertions to the contrary, he would have liked to meet a smart, beautiful bibliophile who he could have intense conversations with, plan quiet cosy dates for, who he could love. Sadly, since he was patently unable to make meaningful connections with eligible women in the real world, he was reduced to eyeing beautiful girls he met inside his own head.

He decided to embrace the break from the constant vigilance that now constrained every foray out of his apartment. He stepped towards the counter to order, surveying the brownies and cookies, his mouth watering in anticipation. As he did so he was shaken to consciousness by a startling noise. Archie was coughing violently in the next room. His eyes were immediately wide open. When the wracking coughs didn’t stop, he switched on his lamp, blinking and rubbing his eyes in the astringent glare, stumbling out of bed to knock at his roomie’s door and ask if he had a fever. He tried to keep calm as Archie admitted, through chattering teeth, that he did. Jughead reassured his friend as he fetched Tylenol and then heated water to make hot tea, the dream dispersing in the cold night like the steam from the boiling water in the brash overhead light of the kitchen. 

Fortunately Archie's tussle with "the Rona," as he insisted on calling it, was more of a painful inconvenience than a health emergency. The worst of it for Jughead was the ceaseless coughing. He left alternating bowls of soup and ice cream outside Archie’s door, rapping sharply and calling out “Arch, food.” They were careful, allowed no visitors, had Archie yell before he used the bathroom so that Jug could go into his own room and close the door. Jughead had him keep a regular check on his temperature. High but not dangerous. JB fetched their groceries, leaving the bags at the door along with a selection of disappointingly healthy, home cooked meals, courtesy of his brother in law, and a hand drawn card from his four year old nephew showing a stick figure Archie whose hair must have used up an entire orange crayon lying in bed, while another stick figure with a grey hat stood next to some sort of box. When he called to say thanks, JB explained that in the picture Unkie Jug was washing his hands. Ranu had taken to telling strangers in the street to wash their hands. His sister’s voice caught in her throat when she said it was both cute and terrifyingly sad.

The dream came often while he took care of Archie. Apparently it rained all the time in his subconscious, the sky a low grey ceiling of dense cloud. That figured; it was on brand. He actually didn't hate it. It was a welcome relief from the raging, glaring, broiling streets of Brooklyn where this year even the sunshine felt sickly and insanitary as it gleamed off glass and steel. He often returned from his forays outside for supplies or to walk off his writer’s block with a blinding headache and spent the next couple of hours taking his temperature every ten minutes. It was a respite to find himself on the street outside the coffee shop, its plate glass windows misty with condensation, beads of moisture chasing each other down the glass. It wasn’t actually rain as much as a kind of saturating wetness in the air that soaked into your clothing to make you sodden and heavy in only a few minutes. It was the late afternoon, long shadows cast over the street by the buildings opposite, soft yellow lights beginning to illuminate shops and offices, offering a comfortable and inviting contrast to the greyness outside. He was always aware that he was dreaming, after that first time. 

Inside the shop was snug and welcoming, the air scented with cinnamon and ginger. Wet umbrellas waited in a stand by the door, heavy coats hanging damply from the backs of chairs. There was a low hubbub of conversation and laughter which even an introvert like Jughead welcomed back like an old friend. When he leaned forward to see the spine of the girl’s book, he found she was reading “Dreams” by Jung. He was a little disappointed that his mind was doing the same gag twice. Not as creative as he would have hoped. He looked around, noticing an artificial pine garland along the counter and strings of twinkle lights glowing weakly above the darkening windows. That, along with the carefully drawn holly leaves and hanukkiyah on the chalkboard told him that it was holiday season. 

Of course, it had to be Christmas. 

It was an odd choice by his subconscious, to make it Christmastime in his wish fulfilment coffee shop. It wasn’t so much that he disliked the holidays. He simply refused to participate. When he was growing up, the big day had been a whole twenty four hours when his dad could drink with impunity. No-one tells you to shape up and get a job on Christmas Day. So Jug would spend the 25th reading, lying on his bed, eating the chips and candy that he’d afforded by hiding his pay-packet from the Twilight from his dad. He studiously ignored FP’s stumbling and groaning in the next room. He’d long since given up on any expectation of a call from his mom. In more recent years he refused all invitations, waved goodbye to Archie when he set off for his mom’s in Chicago, stocked up the refrigerator with festive take-out containers and had a quiet couple of days entirely to himself to write. JB and Parveet usually made a few last ditch attempts to persuade him to spend the day with them but, much as he loved his nephew, he didn’t want to be with him when he was so excited by noisy gifts that he was prone to vomit. Admittedly it was Jughead who generously supplied Ranu with the very noisiest of those toys but those were the perils of parenthood, as he told his brother-in-law with a smirk. He claimed that he preferred his own company but that wasn’t quite it. If he’d gone to JB and Parveet’s they would have made him welcome but he would be the guest in their home, the stranger at the feast, the object of their hospitality. Nothing could make you more aware of your own superfluousness than being the visitor. He might be lonely in his own apartment but at least he belonged there, wasn’t the solitary thing that was out of place. 

Archie was no better after ten days and he fell asleep having decided that, unless there was improvement overnight, he’d have to try to get him to a doctor. Archie wasn’t working, the bottom had fallen out of the personal training market when the gyms had closed so Jug very much hoped that he wasn’t going to need a hospital. He couldn’t imagine the cost of a ventilator. He turned away from that anxious thought and slipped effortlessly into the dream, joining the line at the counter. His first impulse was to look over at the title of her book. It was, as usual these days, a book on lucid dreaming. He was getting irritated by his own lack of invention. At last he was finally asleep long enough to step up to the counter, patting his pocket for a dream wallet, but as he was opened his mouth to give his order, his eyes opened and he was back in his own bed, wondering what had awoken him. He realised that the apartment was in silence. Archie had stopped coughing. Jug tried to convince himself that no cough was a good cough but he was too freaked out by the quiet to go back to sleep. Finally he got up to knock on his pal's door, calling out and waking him from his first decent sleep since he got sick. Even blurry with tiredness Archie understood why he’d been worried and yelled hoarsely through the door, “I’m ok. I’m feeling a little better. Thanks for checking. I love you brother."

Jughead smiled, moved by Archie's affection. "Well I'm not gonna hug it out, so you can forget that, you disease vector. I love you too pal. I’m glad you’re doing better.”

It was a bleak, anxious, infuriating winter, but it seemed as though a more hopeful Spring might soon blossom. It wasn’t the end of the crisis but there were vaccinations in prospect and there would be a new administration to ensure people got them. Even Jug began to feel more optimistic. At night he would find himself in the coffee shop, standing in line. There was still some residual disquiet. One night he felt irrationally nervous about the proximity of the person behind him in line. The next he watched the guy and the girl on the first date. It was going well, he took her hand and leant his head towards her to whisper something. He felt worried on their behalf. He wondered how long it would take before human intimacy stopped spiking anxiety through him, until he realised he’d already felt that way before the pandemic. He resolved to work on that. What was the point of getting the vaccination if he was going to carry on holding people at arm’s length? 

Always, as he waited to give an order that he never got to place, he’d stretch his neck to see the cover of her book. It felt a little like a conversation. Sometimes it was the Freud again, sometimes one of his favourites, Hemingway, Pynchon, Faulkner, Brautigan. Once she had Lovecraft closed on the table in front of her and she was scrolling on her phone. Clearly not a fan. He chuckled on the day he saw that she had “The Fall of The House of Usher,” all that psychodrama in a dream, wheels within wheels. He’d like to talk to her about those books, find out what she liked about them. Then he reproached himself. She was his anima, her taste had to be his at some fundamental level. Except for Lovecraft apparently. Which was odd because he was pretty sure he liked Lovecraft. 

While he invested more and more of his attention in the golden glow of an insubstantial coffee shop, a real life, rather subdued holiday season came and went. Archie stayed in the apartment with him, not wanting to risk another encounter with his old pathogenic adversary even if he was likely to have some immunity, scared to risk infecting his mom or her new wife. The two roommates made an ad hoc stab at decorations, laughing as they taped tinsel to the apartment door in the outline of a tree and decorated it with sticky tacked bottle caps and pictures torn from an old copy of Men’s Health that Archie found in his gym bag. They displayed their three Christmas cards on top of the entertainment unit. On the big day Jughead cooked pasta Alfredo, vetoing some completely insane scheme Archie was dreaming up involving a huge kettle of boiling oil and a frozen turkey. After dinner they played video games late into the night. Jug secretly thought it was the most tolerable Christmas he’d ever had.

After Christmas Archie went back to work more regularly. Along with the annual ‘New Year New You’ types, folks who were looking to lose the lockdown lbs began to seek out personal trainers again. He was getting out of the apartment, exercising and looking happier for it. Jughead had his days free of distractions to get down to writing again. Archie could finally pay his share of the rent. It was almost like the old days, Archie throwing down a bag of sweaty exercise clothes as he came home, singing in the shower, suggesting they call out for pizza. Jughead had supposed that, as the old normal reasserted itself, the dream would retreat, become part of the strange memories of a terrible year, filed under "Let's not go there again." It didn't. In fact it started to develop. 

The night he stepped up to the counter, pulling an unfamiliar phone from his pocket and asking for a plain black drip and a triple chocolate muffin he felt like he'd levelled up. When the barista asked about bean and roast he said, "Surprise me,” and waved the strange phone to pay, relieved when the beep sounded. The girl’s book was at the wrong angle and he couldn’t read the spine no matter how he twisted his neck so he took his cup to the corner of the shop, behind his favourite bookworm, a little excited to be near her. He sat at one of the high stools along the window counter so he could peer over her shoulder like a creep. It was a satisfyingly bulky hardback, he could see the paper had substantial gsm as she turned a page. He approved of the font too, bembo maybe, a good choice anyway, unobtrusive. Then he glimpsed the sapphire shade of the cloth binding inside the dust jacket. His own books were bound in sapphire buckram. Could his subconscious really be that unsubtle, so needy? She must have felt his rapt attention on her because she glanced in his direction, giving him a clear view of his very own first book “Full Force Galesburg” in her hands. He was so embarrassed that he woke up.

Real life steadily picked up pace. The days got brighter, society clambered back onto its feet after being on its knees for so long, stumbling for a moment but righting itself and looking to the future. He’d had his part two vaccination, feeling a little feverish afterwards but decidedly uncontaminated by whatever arcane surveillance devices the tin foil hat brigade were prepared to sacrifice their lives to avoid while still carrying their iPhones and using Amazon. His publisher was spitballing dates for rescheduling the book tour that had been cancelled the previous year. Jughead found that he was less reluctant to travel than he had been in the past, keen for a change of scene. When life had first closed down he'd joked that for introverts like him, sheltering in place was a relief but he found it wasn't true. Surprisingly, he did need community and shared experiences, maybe not as much of it as some folks, but it was still necessary. He was a writer, he needed readers.

Like his real life the dream was taking on a more dynamic narrative. It had become a major part of his life, recurring at least every few days. She was always reading “Full Force.” Sometimes she was biting her bottom lip as she read. He couldn’t tell if that was a good sign. Occasionally she smiled. Once, as he had almost summoned the courage to say something to her, the girl behind the counter looked over and warned, “Betty, your bus.” She looked up startled, hurriedly snatching up a large holdall and a bookstore tote bag. As she called out “Thanks Ethel,” he woke, whispering “Betty.” 

The next night he was sitting on a stool behind the reading girl, Betty, again. He realised he was staring because she looked up and met his eye for the first time. Hers were green and scintillating and her looking at him made him feel a leaping elation. To cover his emotional state he rushed to the counter to order more coffee despite the fact that his cup was only half empty. As he passed he knocked one of her yellow knitted gloves off her table and he woke up blushing.

He was beginning to feel like a stalker so he tried to keep his eyes off the blonde. Realising he had his battered, brown overnight bag slung over his shoulder, he looked inside to avoid creeping on her, even if she was trespassing in his dream. He found a copy of Beloved in there, well thumbed, slightly dog eared and definitely not his. He turned to the section he liked best, Paul D ruminating on the tobacco tin with the rusted shut lid that has taken the place of his heart, and he began to read, tilting the book to catch one of the overhead lights now it was almost dark outside. 

He was deep in the lilting music of the narrative when a clear, polite voice said "Excuse me." He looked up into those glimmering, intoxicating, green eyes. “I'm so sorry to bother you but aren't you Forsythe Jones?"

He was stunned. It seemed inconceivable that a part of his own dreaming mind could surprise him like this. The wobbly necked Austrian really was onto something with that whole unconscious mind thing. He mumbled something incomprehensible and she blushed. "I'm so sorry to have bothered you. How rude of me. I wanted to tell you how much I liked “Spent Gladiator.” I’m sorry to have disturbed you.” As he scrambled for a response, he woke up, like Caliban, crying to dream again.

Even l’esprit d’escalier failed to conjure a witty and gracious response to her kind remark because he hadn't written a book called "Spent Gladiator.” He began to try to imagine what such a book might be about. He found himself hunched over the keyboard, writing like he was possessed, inspired like he had never been before. When he waited in line at the grocery store he scribbled a note of a plot development on an old receipt. A character idea came to him as he brushed his teeth so he dictated it into his phone, toothpaste dripping onto the screen. The final scene sparked into life in his brain and glowed there like a hot coal as he sat across from a perfectly nice girl in a restaurant until he apologised, called her an Uber and rushed home to write it down. All the time he was writing he dreamed of her. The dream was a constant shadow on his waking life, nothing would have kept it out even if he had wanted to lock his doors against it. He dreamed impatiently now, queuing, paying, waiting for her to compliment him again but he never managed to make any further advance. Either he woke before she addressed him or he stared at her in confusion when she told him how much she’d liked the book, unable to reply. He had an intuition that he needed to finish the draft before he could make the connection concrete. He sent a few chapters to his editor. It was a little different from his other work, less action, more reflection. He thought it was good and he was pleased to get a call from Judy saying she had stayed up reading until 4a.m.

Then the dream again but different. She was engrossed in her book, his book, the book. He could see his name on the cover under her fingers. He liked the artwork, tried to commit it to memory. This time she didn’t look up from the page even though he stared at her like he was planning to build an anatomically accurate replica of her in his basement. He noticed a flush on her cheeks. What part was she reading? The blush stroked her skin with rose, down her throat to the neckline of her sweater, the previously creamy skin now gorgeously pink as her blood rushed to the surface. He wondered how much further it spread. Was he imagining that she was breathing a little more heavily than usual? He tried to see how far through the book she was. What had he written to have such a visceral effect on her? She seemed to shift a little uncomfortably in her seat and then finally, with a trembling sigh, she rested the book on the table, closed her eyes for a moment and and glanced about, a little self consciously. He had pulled an unfamiliar copy of ‘By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept’ from the mystifying depths of his bag so he averted his eyes to the print. Could she actually have been turned on by what she'd read? Whatever had happened to her had certainly made him feel pretty excited. He woke up sticky and ashamed and had to put his sheets in the washer like a fifteen year old kid.

In the early dawn of a May morning he sat at his keyboard and found the place in the narrative where he had allowed his loner protagonist to show a hint of vulnerability to the sympathetic coat check girl. He’d had a sense, as he’d ended the scene elliptically, that he was chickening out. This connection would be important to his character, to simply ignore it was an abdication of his duty to his reader. The truth was that he found writing sex almost as stressful as having it. As he tried to assemble some coherent narrative he found himself blushing, horribly aware of the travesties of bad writing about sex, always by men, that garnered such mocking reviews in literary circles. As with his real life sexual encounters, he was too much in his own head, worrying about the end before he’d started. He was so desperate to steer his characters to the safe harbour of a satisfying climax that the narrative became a series of hurdles to be overcome rather than a sensuous exploration of pleasure. He remembered the psych major, whispering, “Hey, take it easy. It isn’t a race,” Freud waggling his plastic head, him terrified that he would be unequal to the task she had set him, as if she were homework that he wanted to get done with as efficiently as possible.

It wouldn’t do. Not for this girl. He wanted to be better for her. He deleted the insert tab A into slot B trash that he had written and began again. This time he would eschew linear narrative. He’d write it impressionistically, a series of images with no definitive end point. Silencing his superego as it side-eyed him viciously, he concentrated on the idea of her. He had to forget that she existed only in his own head, if he thought too much about the onanistic implications of what he was doing he wouldn’t be able to write it. 

Soon his fingers were flying over the keys, some kind of block in his imagination released by this new approach. He wrote about a lace strap pulled down over her soft golden shoulder, her breast lifted from its satin covering, heavy and warm in his hand. His fingers, rough against the silk of her milky skin, his fingernails a little ragged, dragging over her nipple, watching as it tightened in response to his touch. He wrote about her mouth, eager, insistent, chasing his lips as he pulled away and then rounding in a plump “oh” as his hand wrapped around her throat and he nipped at her skin where her shoulder met the ivory column of her neck. He wrote about the rounded symmetry of the place where her thighs met, his fingers brushing over her, lightly, resisting the compelling instinct to pull her legs open, to invade, to possess. Brushing over her, so lightly, again and again, holding her knees closed, over and over until her whimpering resolved into words. “Touch me, put your hands on me, please, please.” He found himself writing about touching her as she thrust her hips up to increase the pressure of his touch, her control dissolving, her neat facade crumbling as she moaned curses and imprecations. He wrote about her hand, strong fingers sliding around him, stroking as he trembled, all of his consciousness concentrated in that movement, her hand against his flesh, the drag and release, the twisting yearning, the need in him that only she could assuage. He wrote about the rightness of covering her with his body, of the undeniable naturalness of finding his home as he lay between her legs, of the irresistible need to be inside her, of the overlapping of body and mind as they moved in unison, following a rhythm that pulsed through everything, of being in exactly the right time and place, of the wholeness of the moment.

When he was done with the passage he thought maybe it might bring the colour to her throat. In his mind Bobblehead Freud toyed smugly with his cigar.

When he dreamed her again he waited breathlessly for the blush. When it came and she rested the book on the table, he met her eye knowingly. The colour on her cheeks deepened to a much rosier hue as she looked at him, her eyes widening. Eventually she spoke, her voice lower than last time, “I'm so sorry to bother you but aren't you Forsythe Jones?” He smiled and nodded and she held up her book to compare his author photo on the back inside flap of the dust jacket with the original. “I’m reading your book,” she said weakly.

“So I see. I’m Jughead by the way. Forsythe is only for book covers. Are you enjoying it? You seemed … engrossed.” He was aware that this could almost be considered flirting. It was so unfamiliar to him as to make him feel that he was being possessed by the spirit of a much smoother man, Philip Marlowe maybe? She was so gorgeously pink with confusion and embarrassment now that he couldn’t help but smirk at her as she struggled for an answer.

“I… yes… that is… the characterisation. There are… themes… Yes, I’m enjoying it very much. You write about relationships well,” she finished defiantly, meeting his eye.

He thanked her warmly. He found that he wanted to look at her so much that, unusually for him, he didn’t become bashful and look at his feet as he talked to her. It was as though there was some invisible beam between their pupils that held him rapt. It was unbelievably thrilling. He’d forgotten that she was a dream, she was a real girl to him now, a real girl who he wanted more than he had ever wanted anything or anyone before. He told her that he was delighted to meet a reader and she smiled, encouraged to continue the conversation. “I actually had a ticket for your reading last night at Elliott Bay but, well, something came up and I couldn't make it. Anyway I'm really pleased to have been able to tell you how much I like your work.” He grinned, delighted by her interest in him and she looked him up and down, shamelessly checking him out and then smiling at him. He blushed as pink as she had, thanked her and woke up with a line of poetry chasing its tail around in his head, something about nights being days when the poet dreamed of his lover. Eventually he had to look it up. “All days are nights to see till I see thee and nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.” Shakespeare really knew about dreams.

As he lay in the darkness each night, waiting for sleep to transport him back to her, he wondered if he was going crazy. He’d been rereading Freud on dreams, as she had done at the start of all this, nodding at passages and underlining them. “The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature” said the beardy guy and Jug could see that, back in the worst days of the pandemic, the constant stress would have led him to conjure a safe and reassuring environment, the coffee shop. He started to read with Siggy’s Austrian accent in his head, “dream-thoughts are engaged only vith vat seems to be important and off great interest to us.” What interested him was his writing and the dream gave him access to a creative wellspring he had not been aware of consciously, giving him the energy and creativity he needed to write almost all of ‘Spent Gladiator’ in less than eight weeks. He didn’t need to read too far to work out why his his muse was the most beautiful, kind and desirable girl he'd ever seen. Freud thought that any endeavour was motivated by sex. He’d say Jughead wrote because he wanted to have sex with the dream girl. In his imagination Freud waggled his head, raised a bushy eyebrow, sucked on his cigar, and said “dreams completely satisfy vishes excited during ze day vich remain unrealized.” He realised that maybe he was spending too much time alone in his own head. Maybe Freud was right. It made perfect sense that he would have created this world and travelled there for respite and inspiration and the safe exploration of his lust. But it felt so real, much more tangible than the “things unrespected,” that he dealt with while awake. And he didn’t only want to make love to her, he wanted to understand her, love her.

He needed to know if there was a bookshop called Elliot Bay. He googled the name and found it in Seattle, a big cedar barn of a place with long shelves and deep armchairs. He could almost smell the books and the coffee and the wood. It looked like home to him. He decided, on a whim, to ask his agent to find a date to include it on the tour. That was when synchronicity really whacked him over the head. When he opened his emails to send his request, he found the confirmed itinerary awaiting him in his inbox. He scanned it only to find that on 23rd December he was booked to give the last reading of the tour at Elliott Bay Bookstore in Seattle. He was flying home to New York on Christmas Eve at 8a.m. He saw now that his road had always been leading to the Emerald City. The universe was not being subtle about this. Freud, his imaginary Austrian friend was uncharacteristically quiet about the whole thing, it suggested that there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in his philosophy. Jug’s discomfiture somehow gave his creativity a jolt and he finished ‘Spent Gladiator’ in ten more frenzied days. Judy and the publisher were amazed by it, by his developing style, by the speed at which he had written it, by the confidence that their usually diffident author demonstrated with regard to it. Betty liked it, he reasoned. It had to be good. The execs wanted to rush it out in hardback in time for the Christmas sales rush.

It was on the tour that he truly began to live more in the dream than in the world, sleepwalking through readings to hurry back to a hotel room to sleep, perchance to dream. He couldn’t imagine how he had created a character as interesting and well formed as her, in all senses of the words. Their conversations were always fascinating. It didn’t feel like she was mirroring his own thoughts. She seemed completely original. They talked about his book, about her work as a radio journalist. They talked about their families. He showed her a picture of Ranu on his phone and she reciprocated with snapshots of her twin niece and nephew. When he asked their names she rolled her eyed and told him 'Juniper and Dagwood' and he replied that he was one of a very few people who could fully feel their pain which earned him a genuine belly laugh. Then, at some point in their talk, he'd be dragged back unwillingly to a consciousness that felt too brash, too scouring, too loud. He recoiled but it was impossible to go back, the dream melting in the light of the sun. He was always exiled until the next night, frustrated and sorrowful. Then, without warning, something changed. At last he didn't wake during their conversation but he had an ominous conviction that the dream was ending. He was entering the final act. He could feel the shape of the narrative. They talked and laughed until, at last, she glanced down at her phone screen and muttered “Damn it," as she gathered her things. He raised an eyebrow and she said "It was so lovely to meet you. I have to go. My bus will be here in... oh God, there it is now. Bye," and she was up, rushing away. He was so clueless that he hadn't even got her number. He woke up as she opened the door and a blast of cold air blew in.

He was relieved to find himself back in the coffee shop the next night, even though his feeling that this was the last time was even more certain. They talked a little more seriously about life and love and dreams. He was nostalgic even while he looked at her. He nailed his courage to the sticking place before the bus panic, boldly asking for her number. He knew it was ridiculous even as she blushed and smiled and reached for his phone. He didn't even own that phone. And she didn’t exist. And even if she did he could hardly call her up and say "Hi you don't know me but I got your number in a dream so now you have to go out with me." He knew it was over. He’d met her and shared something with her. She had validated and inspired him. Now he would have to move on without this succour. The bus pulled up across the street as she was shrugging on her coat and stuffing the yellow gloves into her pocket. She swore under her breath and he had an embarrassing erotic reaction which woke him up.

It seemed for more than a week, that he’d been right, the dream had finally ended. His nights were dreamless and barren. He felt desperate, with no hope of getting back to her.

He had a break from the tour over Thanksgiving so he decided to get on a flight and look in on his dad for a couple of days. It was a change for him to seek out company but his dad seemed excited to be spending the holiday with family, he even talked about cooking. Jug supposed that he should have been thankful to find FP sober and gainfully employed. Ordinarily he would have been, but he could see the relentless effort that it was costing his old man and it made him sad. Jughead was so emotionally wrung out that the sight of the balding Christmas tree in the trailer, its PVC branches drooping limply under the weight of a few ill-assorted and battered ornaments, made a lump rise in his throat. He pictured his dad getting ready for his visit, trying so hard to make amends, abstinent and lonely in that draughty trailer. He’d trimmed the terrible tree with the crumbling pasta art decorations his kids had made in elementary school, trying to make the place festive, and Jug didn’t know what the hell it all meant. What, in the final analysis, was the fucking point? He tried to eat the Thanksgiving meal that FP concocted with the two burners and a fritzing microwave but he was distracted and miserable. He could only tell his dad that he was upset about a girl. FP put down his mismatched knife and fork and looked at his son compassionately. “Look boy, I was never worth a damn as your dad so I won’t presume to give you fatherly advice but, as a guy who fucked it all up, I need to say, if you love her you have to fix it. Doesn’t matter who’s right or who’s wrong, doesn’t matter about whatever the hell the problem is. If you can love her, hold onto her. Look at me Jughead. You don’t want this life. Get your girl and fix it.” 

If only it could be as simple as that. He longed to dream of her but the dream simply didn't come. He had to accept, at last, that he was in love with her, no matter how hopeless that was. He set off for Utah on Saturday, distracted and exhausted, somehow managing to leave his phone in the cab to the airport. He had to buy a new one in Salt Lake City. In the store he recognised the phone he owned in the dream and bought it. This was the phone that should have had her number in it. His reason weakened by sleeplessness and misery, he began to wonder if, by some kind of weird miracle, he was about to meet her in Seattle, in a coffee shop on Christmas Eve. It seemed like the worst kind of magical thinking but he couldn’t shake the hope.

That night, in a beige and cream hotel room in Utah so boring that it made his eyes burn, unexpectedly he found himself back with her. He could talk to her again. He had the same feeling of finality, a feeling that this was all coming to an end but she smiled when he asked for her number and swore as the bus pulled up, gathering her things in a frenzy, meeting his eye and blushing a little. There was a promise in it. She giggled at his obvious appreciation of her as he watched her cross the shop, rushing to the door to get to the bus. He still didn’t wake up. He wondered if, maybe, he’d be allowed to stay and live in the dream now. The hotel would call an ambulance in the morning to collect his unconscious body while in here he could be with her. He’d take it. She got to the door, flung it open and dashed across the street in defiance of the crosswalk light. 

Even if the cab driver had seen her in time there would have been no way he could have stopped.

As he ran out to her, kneeling on the street in the crepuscular gloom, he could see one of her yellow gloves, soaking up the dirty rainwater in the gutter. As he crouched by her, the wool gradually turned red.

He woke screaming her name. 

That was it, he supposed. That was the full story. He hoped he wouldn’t meet her in Seattle. It was terrible to dream it. To see it actually happen would be unendurable. He wondered what had changed to bring him back to the dream only to give him this ghastly reprise.

It really was over this time. He knew he wouldn’t dream of the coffee shop again. He realised he should have tried to find out the name of her radio station, gotten her address, anything to help him find her. He hadn’t done those things because he was still imagining that she only existed in his mind. Now he thought differently. He didn’t think he was such a good writer that he could have summoned her from his own mind, not a woman as surprising and smart and complete as her. He suspected it was crazy to think of her as a real person but he hadn’t really slept in a week so that was weakening his grip on what could be true. He wondered if he’d ever sleep properly again. Every time he closed his eyes he could hear the scream of the taxi cab’s brakes, the thud as it made contact with her body, see that damn glove. His readings were torture, her death before his eyes all the time. He couldn’t explain to the concerned bookstore owners that he was being bereaved every night so he had to say that he was having trouble sleeping. “Missing my own bed,” he shrugged and they smiled sympathetically. He didn’t know if he belonged in Kansas or Oz now. If he hadn’t been heading to Seattle he would have cancelled the rest of the dates and gone home. He called the publisher and got them to change his flight home on Christmas Eve. The woman he spoke to was horrified by the request. “I can get you on a flight at eleven in the evening but you won’t be home til Christmas morning. If it gets delayed you’ll be stuck there til after the holiday.” He told her that was what he needed her to do. Unable to distinguish between what was real and what was his dream he started trying to search for her on social media, “Betty” in Seattle got him nowhere. He’d go to the coffee shop, if it even existed, and he’d wait for an imaginary girl.

He flew into SeaTac from a reading in San Francisco, arriving an hour before he was due at Elliott Bay. He found he was searching for her in the crowd as he struggled through the Q and A. She’d said she had a ticket. No luck. At the end of the event he was surprised to find a uniformed driver waiting for him holding a card that read “Forsythe Jones.” He was not generally provided with transport. The driver said he’d been hired by this publisher and gave the name of the imprint so he shrugged and travelled back to his hotel in style. In his room he googled ‘coffee shops in Seattle’ and trailed through pages of search results until finally he found what that he was looking for. He stared at the image on his screen of a plate with the yellow brick design that his chocolate muffins had been served on. He noted the address and waited for it to be morning so he could head over there. 

As he lay exhausted in front of the tv, he must have fallen asleep, only waking at midday when the desk called up to ask if he was staying another night. He couldn’t believe that he had almost overslept and let her die. He reproached himself. “She’s not real you idiot, now get your shit together before she gets herself killed.” 

His hand on the coffee shop door sent him tumbling through layers of memories of this exact moment, the coolness of the metal beneath his fingers, the soft rain soaking through his hat, drenching a jacket he’d bought for the biting dry cold of a New York winter rather than this saturating, drizzling greyness. The name of the place was painted on the door in an arc of green letters, “Emerald City Coffee.” Taking a deep breath he pushed the door open and stepped inside his dream. It was as he had seen it in the main but like one of those spot the difference puzzles there were unexpected touches. He scanned the chalkboard, noting that under the menu, along with the parade of holly, robins, Hannukkah menorahs and fir trees some wit had written “It’s beginning to look a latte like Christmas.” The paper napkins had quotations from the Wizard of Oz printed on them. “If I only had a heart,” “Somewhere over the rainbow skies are blue,”“We’re not in Kansas anymore.” The one he was given alongside his drip coffee and muffin, read “The dreams that you dare to dream really do come true,” and he stared at it as if it were presenting him with an utterance from the oracle at Delphi. These days his life was so dense with synchronicity that he struggled to discern dream from reality. He walked over to his table as if he were sleepwalking and sat staring out of the misted window as the afternoon light dimmed and reflections from the coffee shop overlaid the scene outside. That was how he’d lived this year, the shadows and reflections of a dream indistinguishable from his real life. The rain fell interminably. He watched as customers arrived, reversing through the door to shake their umbrellas as they entered, running their hands over wet hair, holding out their arms and giving a shake of relief to be out of the rain. An older guy called out “Hey Ethel, did you hear Santa’s moving to Seattle?” Ethel looked at him, waiting for him to supply the punchline, “Because we got a lot of rain here… rain here, reindeer, geddit?” She smiled tolerantly and several of the other patrons groaned in a companionable way. He sure wasn’t in New York anymore Toto.

He turned back to gaze out of the window, the reflection of the twinkle lights combining with the moisture on the glass and the precipitation outside to obscure his view with a soft sheen of light. Then, as the offices across the street greeted the twilight by illuminating their windows, she appeared down the block. His heart pounded. She was a real girl, with a heart and a brain. He knew with certainty that within minutes she would be sitting feet away from him, sipping some kind of grassy tea and tearing morsels from an almond croissant with her strong, capable fingers. The cognitive dissonance was so severe that it seemed to be twisting his brain like one would wring out a wet sponge. She was a creature of his imagination, a character. At the same time she was the girl he was wildly in love with. He had expected her at any moment and still knew that she didn’t exist. She was almost at the door. He would have to pretend not to know her, the familiarity he had earned over long months would have to be relinquished. He had kept telling himself she was a shadow and yet here she was, flesh and blood before him, and his duty was to keep the blood inside the flesh. The heavy holdall she carried was pulling her shoulder down, making her jut her opposite hip. Her hand was on the door, clad in the yellow glove that would soak in her blood unless he could forestall her fate. He had no plan, his reason was asleep at the wheel. She stepped through the door into the light, the rain jeweling her hair, smiling at the girl behind the counter as she ordered. He waited to be recognised, surely she would know him. He didn’t have to wait long. She was staring at him as she walked towards her usual seat. She had a hot chocolate and a slice of carrot cake. It was a deviation from the fantasy that helped to reinforce that this Betty was her own person, not one of his creations. As she sat, she cleared her throat to attract his attention. She needn’t have bothered, it was already attracted. “Excuse me, I’m sorry to bother you. You’re Ju …Forsythe Jones aren’t you?” The slip was unexpected. His books were published under his given name. He was giving strangers a look at his psyche, he couldn’t give them his name too, it would give them too much power over him. Only people who knew him personally called him by the name he had given himself. He wrangled his lips into a smile and nodded, shooting for politeness rather than the terrifying intensity he felt. She carried on, “Oh I’m so pleased to see you. That is... sorry, That sounds weird. I mean to say, I enjoy your work. I actually had a ticket for your reading last night but I had to stay away. I was disappointed to miss you … it. I was sorry to miss it. Anyway, sorry to bother you. I know you must hate that — having to talk to random strangers who think they know you. Sorry. Rambling.” She put her yellow gloves on the table and put a hand to her temple, rubbing a small circle there as if she had a headache. 

It was vital, if he were to keep her safe, that he seized the initiative without delay so acting completely out of character he picked up his cup and put it on her table, “Is it ok if I join you? I don’t know anyone in Seattle. Is it always as wet as this?” Was he seriously talking to her about the weather? Inexplicably she didn’t seem to mind his complete inanity. She laughed and said, “Oh it only rains twice a year. January to June and then July to December.” He chuckled. She told him she was Betty Cooper and held out her hand and he shook it like she was a new acquaintance. Was it actually this easy to pick up girls in coffee shops? He asked her which of his books she had read and she looked a little sheepish when she said she had read all three but that she had liked ‘Spent Gladiator’ the most. “You’ve already read it?” he asked and she nodded and bit her lip in a gesture he had seen a hundred times even though he had never met this girl before in his life. He wanted to put out his finger and release that lip, stroke along it and then lean it and kiss it. The thought made him lightheaded.

They chatted a little about books. Her favourite novel was Beloved. He mentioned the tobacco tin and she supplied a quotation, “His tobacco tin, blown open, spilled contents that floated freely and made him their play and prey.” He looked into her eyes as she said it and wondered if she knew more than she was telling. He asked if she had read By Grand Central Station and she pulled a copy from her bag. He was pretty sure it was the copy he had held in his own hand a few weeks before, he recognised the bookshop sticker on the back. She glanced at her phone screen, checking the time and he knew he had to do something, anything at all, to stop her standing and picking up the yellow gloves, running out of the door to her fate. If this had been a dream maybe he could have kissed her, she might have melted into his arms and smiled and forgotten about the bus. In the real world he didn’t have the chutzpah for that and anyway sexual assault was a thing and you couldn’t do that shit. Instead he reached across the table and put his hand over hers for a moment before withdrawing it. As he did so she caught hold of his fingers and held on. She seemed to reach some kind of decision. She looked searchingly into his eyes. “I’m sorry. This has all been so strange. I’m going to tell you something and you’re probably going to want to call the cops but when I’ve told you I promise I’ll get out of your life. I really feel like I have to tell you this first. Is that ok?” He nodded mutely. This was new territory, unrehearsed in the dreams. “So, when we were all in quarantine, spring of 2020, I started to have this weird dream. Are you ok?” 

His face must have shown his amazement. “Yeah, I think I have a story like this one. You’re in it. But go on. Tell me.”

“Ok,” she whispered. “By the way, did the car come last night, to pick you up from the reading?” He nodded, trying to catch up. “Good. That’s good. In my dream I was at the Elliott Bay Bookstore. That’s not so unusual. I go there a lot and I was missing it when we were all sheltering at home. I was reading on an e-reader which is the pits. I like a real book, the texture of the paper, the way it sounds as you turn a page, that smell. Anyway I thought nothing of this dream at first but it kept happening. I was getting a glass of wine from the little bar they have there. Then I realised I must be at a reading. I must have dreamt about that reading hundreds of times. You were the author. You were reading ‘Spent Gladiator.’ I’m afraid I didn’t know your work so I was a little weirded out when I googled you and you turned out to be a real person. I figured that I’d heard your name or read a review or something and forgotten. I was working from home a lot and I had more free time so I got interested in the psychology of dreams, trying to work out what my psyche was trying to tell me, apart from the obvious of course.” He quirked an eyebrow. Clearly he was missing the obvious. She blushed. Christ, he adored that blush. “Well, I mean, you know. Single woman, alone in quarantine,” she gestured towards herself, “Attractive man,” she gestured towards him and he felt his own cheeks flushing hot. “Sorry, so inappropriate,” she muttered under her breath.

“I wrote a sex scene for you,” he blurted and she let out a surprised shriek of laughter.

“Not the one with the coat check girl?”

“Yeah,” he mumbled, staring at the table.

“I liked that one. I liked it a lot,” she said, quietly, before straightening her shoulders and continuing. “Anyway, it didn’t stop. I’d get a little further each time but then I’d wake up and feel like it wasn’t finished. But I liked it, looked forward to it. It was comforting amid all the…” she made a vague gesture, twirling her hand and he nodded. He knew what she meant. “Anyway I couldn’t find a copy of the book you were reading from in my dream and that bothered me. When it was released as your latest novel I couldn’t pretend that I’d read about you or whatever I had been trying to believe. There was something strange happening that linked me to you. So one night when the reading finished and you were signing books I went up and we started to talk. I was flirting pretty hard and you were oblivious in this really attractive, diffident way. Dream-you is extremely reticent. After a few weeks of that I got impatient and cut to the chase. I asked if you wanted to get a drink.” She stopped abruptly as light swept across their table. She looked around. A bus had pulled up across the street, its headlights glaring in through the window. He could see that she was torn. 

He reached out and took her hand again. “There’s a really good reason that I can’t let you catch that bus. Wherever you need to go, I’ll get you there. Stay here with me for a few minutes longer. Carry on.” She looked at him and he thought he saw a glimmer of understanding there.

“Right, ok. So in my dream we headed out from the store. Pretty much everyone else had gone. I guess it took a while to get to the drinks invitation. I’m not normally confident enough to do the asking. As we left the store, out of nowhere, a guy comes shambling up to us. He’s got something in his hand, I don’t really see what. Seattle’s a pretty safe city so I didn’t realise it was a mugging at first. He yelled that we had to give him our phones and money and you got this look in your eye, like you were kind of excited instead of scared. I thought for a second that you were going to fight him but then you looked at me and you took out your phone and your wallet. You were so calm. You handed it over. I was shaking but I gave him my purse. Then he wanted my necklace. It’s only silver, not even worth anything and I couldn’t undo the clasp because I was shaking. Anyway he punched me and then I was on the ground. When I looked up you were on him. I don’t think you knew he had a gun until... until he shot you.” She seemed to be struggling to breathe properly, gasping the sentences out. 

He stroked her fingers, trying to reassure her. “Hey, it’s ok. I’m right here.”

“He ran. You died. All that blood. Dripping from my fingers. The smell of it. Cooling so fast on my hands. Sticky. I was trying to hold it inside you, my hands on your chest, your heart stuttering and then … stopping. And it was all my fault. And I really fucking liked you.” She was crying now, as if he were actually dead, not sitting in front of her, holding her hand, reaching out to stroke her hair. As he did so the bus pulled away and he exhaled a shaking breath that he hadn’t realised he’d been holding.

“Hey, hey. It’s all ok. You saved me. I’m assuming you sent the car.” 

She nodded. “I thought about writing to you. Trying to get you to cancel but there was no way I could tell you the story so I didn’t sound crazy or like I was threatening you or something. I ran it through a hundred scenarios and finally I realised that I couldn’t risk going there at all. We couldn’t meet. If I wasn’t there you’d be gone way before that guy turned up. It was really hard to sit at home last night, knowing that you were there and thinking that we’d never meet. I missed you.”

He smiled and reached out as he had wanted to since she had appeared outside the window. He stroked the back of his fingers against her soft cheek, taking a strand of her hair between his fingers and tucking it gently behind her ear. To feel her warmth, the physicality of her was a different kind of dream.

She continued, “I have some contacts in the SPD through my job so I tipped them off about a guy with a gun that they should look at. They picked him up last night. There’s pretty good DNA evidence to tie him to a couple of robberies and a sexual assault.” She looked into his eyes and smiled weakly, “I thought I’d never see you, in real life. I’d given you up. And then you were sitting here. None of it makes any rational sense. I feel like I know you even though we’ve never met. Do you really have a nephew called Ranu?”

“Yep. And you have a niece and nephew called, now what was it? Dagmar and Jupiter?”

“Close enough,” she winced. “None of this can have really happened can it?”

“It’s happened so I guess it can. I have no idea how. Maybe reality is way more complicated that we understand.”

They sat a while longer while he told her about his dreams, about the taxicab and the yellow glove. He kept needing to touch her, to reassure himself she wasn’t going to simply fade away. She nodded solemnly as he spoke, trying to figure out the repercussions of the narratives. If he’d died on the night of the 23rd then she would have died the day after. Saving him saved herself. He asked if she would please put her number into his phone and she smiled, saying that she always did. 

“So where was the bus supposed to take you?” he asked, as Ethel behind the counter began to clear the counter in a noisy way that indicated that she wanted to close up.

“SeaTac. I’ve missed my flight to my sister’s for Christmas, back east,” she smiled.

He glanced at his phone. It was a quarter after six. “Me too,” he said, smiling back at her. “Whatever shall we do?”

She stared at the yellow gloves for a moment and then bit her lip, deciding. Finally she met his eye with an air of defiance. “I’m going to suggest something but it might be way too weird. Do you… would you want to spend Christmas with me? My apartment is a block over. That’s probably completely crazy but I feel like I know you even though we’ve only just met.”

“Hey, I’ve known you for almost two years. There’s no-one I’d rather spend Christmas with,” he replied.

She started to put on the yellow gloves. “I have literally no groceries at home. It’ll be take out for Christmas dinner.”

He turned to her and stroked a hand over her cheek, “Betty, you really are the girl of my dreams.”

Her apartment was clean and smelled like baking and furniture polish. She had snapshots strung across the walls on strings of twinkle lights and every flat surface was home to some sort of ornament, vase or picture frame. He was suddenly very glad not to be returning to his empty apartment, bereft of even a hint of the Christmas spirit. Her Christmas tree was generous and abundant, nothing matched on it but somehow it still gave a coherent picture of her tastes. He had the sense of a life that was being lived energetically. The common feature with his living space were the books. She hadn’t been joking when she said she spent a lot of time in bookshops. There were shelves where the books stood in double rows, others where they were piled horizontally to make the most economical use of the space. She went into the bedroom to unpack her bag and he ran his finger along the spines. There were many things he recognised from his own shelves but there were other enthusiasms here too. She had a lot of European poetry in translation and a large section of true crime, lots of psychology texts too. There was their old friend Freud, battered and well read. He wondered at the dimensions of her that he’d been unable to grasp in the dream, she was a prism and he’d seen only one of her colours. He overheard her voice from the other room, making an apologetic phone call to her sister. “I’m so sorry Pol. I know I’m leaving you to deal with her but I can’t help it. No, no, I’m not on my own. A friend is stranded too so we’re going to have Christmas together. Yes, a good friend… Maybe, I refuse to comment… Ok, I’ll get a flight on the 27th. Tell the twins I said sorry. Love to Jason. I will. I know you are. Ok, bye. Merry Christmas Pol.” 

He smiled, trying to fill in the gaps in the conversation and reached for his own phone to preempt JB’s last minute holiday invitation. When she picked up she was already talking a mile a minute, holiday music and the laughter of her son in the background. “Jug, are you calling to say you’re coming after all? Guess what? Dad’s here! He called last week and asked if we had space. Ranu’s going crazy.” Jug explained that he was stuck in Seattle and reassured her that he had somewhere to stay and someone to drink egg nog with, like he had ever drunk egg nog in his life. 

He spoke with Ranu who kept yelling something incoherent about Gramps being magic so he said “Hey Ran, put Grandpa on will you?” FP came to the phone, laughing and promising his grandson that he’d do the trick again in a second. “Hey Dad, sounds like you’re having a good time.”

“I am. I’m doing the empty paper bag trick for the kid. He’s never seen it before. He’s a live wire. Did JB say you missed your flight?”

“Yeah but it’s ok. I wanted to tell you I took your advice. It was good advice, Dad. See you soon right?”

“Hope so. Proud of you.”

She came back in as he was ending the call. “So what’re your Christmas traditions? How do you usually like to spend Christmas Eve?” she asked.

He smiled at her. “I’m not much for old traditions. What do you say we start some new ones?” He walked over to her and kissed her as he had dreamed of doing for months. 

As he reached out for her he tried to recapture the insight he had had when writing about making love to her. He needed to experience the moments as they were, not drive a narrative arrow through them to kill them stone dead. A kaleidoscope of impressions in the jewel light of the Christmas tree lights. He watched his own hand as it slid into her hair, the gold flowing like water between his fingers, cool and smooth. He enjoyed the sensation, not allowing himself to think of the next moment. She sighed and leaned her head backwards so that his hand ran through the length of her hair, closing her eyes to focus on the pleasure. The lights illuminated her face in jewel-like colours, in stained glass, like an object of devotion. He used the back of his hand to brush over her temple, down across the softness of her cheek, down to her throat where he could see her pulse throb. Her head was still thrown back and when her reached his long fingers to circle her throat the throb flickered against his thumb. He pressed in just a little and her eyes half opened, so dark with lust that she seemed transfigured. She leaned forward and kissed him with passionate intensity, her tongue running across his lips. He opened his mouth to pull her lower lip between his teeth and she moaned into him, low and lost.

Her breasts were as smooth and creamy as he had imagined and as he stroked them with the pads of his thumbs she mewled and shivered. He would have liked to have spent hours running his hands over them, pinching gently at her nipples, licking and dragging them with his teeth.  
Her hand on him was a revelation. He lay back on her couch and let her do with him as she chose, light strokes, soft kisses, insistent touches that brought him to the edge before retreating, leaving him trembling but trusting. Then a different sensation, soft wetness, pulling and swirling, her mouth on him. He watched now, transfixed, her hair disarranged over her naked shoulders, her green eyes looking up at him as she took him, again and again, deeper. He wondered how he had existed before he had felt her mouth on him. 

He pushed her knees wide apart and stood back to look at her. She was already soft with pleasure, he could move her as he chose now. Stroking over her and drawing out sighs of contentment, relentless pressure to make her pant with longing, thrusts to make her cry out. This was a landscape that they could explore together. He knew with certainty that they would travel this way again and so he felt no compulsion to traverse every road, there was time for that. He meandered and wandered, his fingers tracing the route on her skin.

To look down his body and see himself inside her, her body accepting him, her lips at his shoulder, moaning against his skin as he moved in her, her hips meeting his, the relief of having found her, of her reality, of her acceptance of him, of the promise of having rescued each other, made tears spring up in his eyes. When he looked into her eyes, he saw the tears there too and knew she was remembering a world where he didn’t exist. Neither of them would go back to that world.

They got up eventually to survey her supposedly empty pantry. He grinned at the riches stored there and constructed spaghetti with garlic, olive oil and chilli flakes as she watched in surprise. He explained that he had been responsible for feeding his little sister as a kid and that he knew a hundred ways to make a scratch meal out of available carbs and little else. “I’m at a loss when you give me recipes that involve loads of fancy ingredients but give me an empty cupboard and I can feed you,” he explained.They took their bowls back to bed to watch Bruce Willis liberate the Nakatomi Plaza and argue about the movie’s Christmas credentials. He was a guest but he wasn’t a plus one. It felt like the kind of Christmas Eve tradition he could get behind.

He’d spent barely two nights in the same place in a month so when he opened his eyes in the soft light of a grey Seattle Christmas morning he didn’t exactly know where he was. The previous day drifted back to his sleepy brain and for a moment he had no clue if it had been dream or reality. Then his eyes focused and he could see her smiling eyes gazing down at him with enormous tenderness. “You’re really here?” he whispered. “Not a dream?” and she leaned down to kiss him.

“I kept waking myself up all night to check you were real. It’s better that the year Santa bought me a kitten.” 

He laughed and reached for her, “Santa missed me every year but I guess he was saving up my gifts. I must have made the nice list at last.”

They were eating breakfast when Archie FaceTimed to wish Jug Merry Christmas, surprised to find that his pal was still in Seattle and astounded when Jug twisted his phone so that Betty could wave hello. Once he had recovered from his shock Jug noticed that he seemed preoccupied. “I'm kind of freaking out. I keep having this weird dream. I think I have to go to 5th Avenue on New Year’s Day to meet a girl I don’t know. Is that crazy?” said Archie. Jug and Betty raised their eyebrows at each other and said in unison that it didn’t sound crazy at all.

**Author's Note:**

> Freud and Jung 
> 
> If you haven’t really studied Freud here’s a really broad strokes overview. (I’m oversimplifying pretty hard here.) Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis. He gets a rough deal because some of his ideas were pretty kooky and it is rumoured that his relationships were inappropriate but he also helped transform the treatment of mental illness. The treatments that were offered to people suffering from conditions such as depression and compulsive behaviour before Freud ranged from water immersion (staying underwater for long as possible without drowning) to the use of a spinning stool to centrifuge one’s brain into the right condition. Imagine being so depressed that you can’t get out of bed and then having someone almost drown you. Freud advocated the talking cure instead, listening to his patients to try to understand what trauma they had endured that had led to their neurosis. Most of his patients were women, repressed and abused by their society. It’s that classic thing where someone has responded perfectly naturally to being attacked by forces outside their control and then we blame them and try to make them fit into the damaging society rather than fixing patriarchy or capitalism or whatever.
> 
> Freud thinks we bury things we can't face in a hidden part of our mind - but the stuff we repress rises up, making us behave in strange, compulsive ways, hurting us. These strange behaviours are what he calls neuroses. 
> 
> Freud believed that the mind has three elements:  
> The id which is concerned with our bodily desires. It’s fuelled by aggression and the desire for sex. It wants instant gratification. It’s your drunk friend in the bar who gets grabby with the person they want to have sex with.  
> The ego is more thoughtful. It tries to satisfy the requirements of the id without you getting arrested or beaten up. In the scenario above it’s you, saying to your friend, “Hey pal, leave it for tonight. Come back and try talking to them when you don’t have vomit on your shoes. More likely to make a good impression then.”  
> The superego is the voice of your culture, the values that you have internalised, whether you wanted to or not. It often opposes the id, giving rise to feelings of guilt or denial in relation to our desires. It’s the part of your mind that remembers what you did last night and shakes its metaphorical head and tells you that you’re filthy and depraved. If it’s not telling you that — either well done, you have escaped its shackles OR, more likely, you aren’t being nearly depraved enough on the regular. 
> 
> He had a lot to say about dreams but I think I cover some of that in the story.
> 
> There is a whole lot of dark, misogynist and just plain weird stuff in Freud too but that’s not relevant to this story. 
> 
> I also refer to the work of Swiss psychotherapist Carl Jung. He was Freud’s protege but they had a terrible disagreement that ended their intense relationship. He thought we had number of elements to our psyches that, once we mature, we’re always trying to reconcile into a consistent whole. Amongst these are the persona which is the face we show to the world, the shadow or the parts of ourself that we reject and feel ashamed and anxious about.  
> Men have a female identity, their anima, while women have a male aspect, the animus. It’s the part of ourself that has been repressed by the strict gender roles we encounter as we grow up. So being well is recognising and accepting all those elements of yourself.
> 
> Jung also believed in synchronicity. This is a bit spooky. It’s when events are connected by meaning not by causation. In this story Jughead has a dream where he is told about a bookshop in Seattle and then he gets an email where he learns he is to go to that very bookshop. Synchronicity, Jung would say. Jung was a firm believer in the paranormal too.
> 
> The other relevant idea is the collective unconscious. Jung agreed with Freud that there is part of our mind that is hidden from us, that we repress. But then he thought that there was an even deeper part that is shared, with others of our tribe and at the deepest level, with all humans. It makes us create art and tell stories with striking similarities across times and cultures. It’s kind of a hive mind but we don’t access it consciously. It bubbles up in art and dreams.


End file.
